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Voters in the crucial swing state will also decide key questions on their — and our — climate future.
In four days, Pennsylvania will become just about the most important place on Earth.
It is unlikely that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump can reach the White House without carrying the Keystone State; winning Pennsylvania bumps either’s odds of prevailing in the whole election to over 90%, according to polling analyst Nate Silver’s models. The state will also play a deciding role in control of the U.S. House and Senate, which in turn will help or hamper the next president’s agenda. America’s domestic trajectory, its foreign policy decisions, and even its allies and enemies could all come down to the whims of the state’s 8.9 million registered voters.
But Pennsylvanians have other important choices to make on their ballots, too. “Pennsylvania is a major energy state, and its decisions — regardless of what type of energy it is — have a huge impact on America’s energy portfolio,” John Qua, the campaign manager of Lead Locally, which is supporting 17 down-ballot candidates in the state, told me.
As the nation’s second-biggest gas producer after Texas and third-biggest coal producer after Wyoming and West Virginia, Pennsylvania also holds the distinction of being the fifth-largest greenhouse gas-emitting state in the nation. Its state legislature hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 2008, in large part because of the influence of the fossil fuel industry over local politics. The American Petroleum Institute donates more to Pennsylvania lawmakers than those in any other state, and while fracking isn’t the decisive local issue it’s made out to be in the popular consciousness, it still employs around 100,000 people — more than made the difference in deciding the 2020 election in the state. (Harris notably reneged on her 2019 pledge to ban fracking if elected in an apparent overture to Pennsylvanians, although the state’s imperiled Democratic senator, Bob Casey, has been hammered by his Republican challenger over her prior position.)
Pennsylvania has a Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, until at least 2026, and Democrats hold slim control over the state House of Representatives by a margin of 102 to 101. The ambition this cycle is to keep the state House and flip the Republican-held state Senate. Picking up three seats there would earn Democrats a governing trifecta, with a tie-breaking vote going to Democratic Lt. Gov Austin Davis. Flip four seats, and they’d have the majority.
But “if you asked me to bet you $10 that the Democrats would win, I wouldn’t take the bet,” David Masur, the executive director of PennEnvironment, a green research and advocacy group that works in the state, told me. “I think it’s just a long shot.”
The path to winning the state Senate and achieving a governing trifecta clearly runs through three districts. The first and easiest pickup is in SD-15, around the state capital in Harrisburg, where the “map is much friendlier to Democrats,” according to Masur. The party would then need to win a competitive seat in SD-37, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, which has tilted blue recently and also seems theoretically within reach. But things get trickier in SD-49, Democrats’ “white whale” district in Erie County, which President Biden won by 2 points but where Republican senator Dan Laughlin remains well-liked. To wrest back the chamber, in other words, the Democrats would “have to run the table,” Masur said. “I don’t even think there’s another race where you could go, ‘Oh, they could get the majority by winning this other seat.’ There’s nowhere else to go. They have to win those three.”
Because of recent redistricting, the climate groups working in the state are cautious about getting their hopes up too high. “Flipping the [state] Senate, which is currently held by Republicans, might be a two-cycle endeavor with these new maps,” Lead Locally’s Qua said. This doesn’t necessarily mean all is lost: Even maintaining control of two of the three levers of government in Pennsylvania would be a victory, and Democrats this summer managed to garner enough bipartisan support to pass legislation to bring solar panels to state schools.
But the stakes — and promises — of a trifecta feel crucial and tantalizingly close. According to a recent analysis by PennEnvironment, Pennsylvania is 48th in the nation for the percentage growth of total solar, wind, and geothermal in the past decade, and 46th in the nation for the percentage of growth in total solar over the past five years, generating less than its neighbors New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. “The fossil fuel industry is extremely moneyed and extremely influential, and it’s created a political reality where it’s very difficult to move good climate and clean energy policy forward in Harrisburg,” Flora Cardoni, PennEnvironment’s deputy director, told me. Climate obstructionists in the state Senate often refuse to call up good environmental policies for votes, leaving the state with “no laws on the books that require utility companies in Pennsylvania to increase the amount of clean renewable energy that they provide to their customers” which is “a huge impediment to progress.”
It’s not as if Democrats aren’t ready to go — they are. Shapiro is sitting on a two-bill plan for tackling climate change in the state. One would boost renewable energy to 35% of Pennsylvania’s total generation by 2035, which Cardoni described as “a huge step in the right direction, although we need to do much more.” The second bill would make polluters pay for their carbon emissions and spend the resulting money on clean air, water, and energy efficiency projects — essentially, a backup plan for if the state’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative fails. (Owing to a question of constitutionality, RGGI is in limbo with the state’s Supreme Court.)
So, in a sense, you have to go for it. “Yeah, they’re really hard races,” admitted Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, which is supporting 26 candidates in the state. “But if you win,” she added, “you win the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the country.” While she was loath to “compare our states against each other,” Spears pointed out that Pennsylvania’s emissions are about two and a half times those of Arizona, which makes it a much bigger opportunity for reductions.
Perhaps the most important point: No one really knows what’s going to happen. Not only are organizers working with new maps in the state due to 2022 redistricting, but state-level races also rarely attract substantial enough polling to make reliably predictive guesses, especially when there are so many toss-ups and razor-thin margins. Adding to the trickiness, Pennsylvania is one of the few states where residents still appear willing to split their tickets; in 2020, ticket-splitting between the president and the state Legislature was up to 15 points in places, which is part of why Climate Cabinet has targeted races in the state with margins of up to 10 points that other groups wouldn’t touch. “Folks have been like, ‘the Pennsylvania Senate’s not doable.’ That’s the word on the street,” Spears told me. “But I think people are forgetting a little bit that that was also the word on the street about the Minnesota Senate and the Michigan legislature,” which flipped during the 2022 midterms.
What’s encouraging is that Pennsylvania voters — contrary to their image of being fracking obsessives — have been curious or even enthusiastic about pivoting to clean energy when organizers have spoken with them. Following Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused outages across the state, many residents now “recognize that the grid is outdated,” Julia Kortrey, the deputy state policy director at Evergreen Action, a national climate advocacy group, told me. There’s an acknowledgment among many that “the status quo is not working.”
As in many parts of the country this year, local races in Pennsylvania are mainly focused on battles over education, abortion access, immigration, and crime, not necessarily clean energy. But often, climate-related issues are bubbling just under the surface. “I’m not going to go up to someone’s door and ask ‘What issue is on your mind today?’ and have them say, ‘I’m really worried about the PM2.5 concentration or the Mauna Loa CO2 readings,’” Spears told me. “But if they’re like, ‘The cost of living is too high,’ I’m going to have a conversation about home insurance.”
A particularly good example of this is playing out in one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House races, which will help determine the ultimate makeup of Congress. In the Lehigh Valley, Democratic Representative Susan Wild is attempting to hold off her Republican challenger, state Representative Ryan Mackenzie, who voted against the school solar bill and the state’s clean water act. Wild had been particularly instrumental in helping to replace lead pipes in the area, and she’s made her leadership on the issue prominent in her campaigning. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and lead pipe removal can seem very — I don’t want to say national, but it can be hard to visualize,” Nate Fowler, the regional campaigns director of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “But for voters in this part of the Commonwealth, it’s easy for them to understand why this is so important.”
It won’t be until after the dust from Tuesday settles — when Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes have been allocated, and its U.S. House and Senate races decided — that national attention will turn to the consequences of the state’s down-ballot races, if it ever does. But whether Democrats run the table or Republicans eat into their opponents’ grip on the legislature, Pennsylvania’s elections will be pivotal to the nation’s greater evolving energy story.
“So much of what we can accomplish in Pennsylvania will lay the groundwork for what is accomplished across the country,” Kortrey, of Evergreen Action, said. “I tell folks, ‘If we can do it in Pennsylvania, we can do it anywhere.’”
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On resuming rare earth shipments, hurricane tracking, and EV tax credits
Current conditions: The Ohio Valley is still sweltering through the last remnants of this week’s brutal heat wave • The death toll from recent floods in South Africa has risen to 101 • It’s 90 degrees in Venice, Italy, where the world’s rich and famous are gathering for the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.
The U.S. and China have hammered out the details of a trade deal, including an agreement that China will resume rare earth shipments to the U.S. Rare earth materials are essential for everything from planes to EVs to wind turbines. China controls most of the world’s rare earth production and halted exports in April in response to President Trump’s tariff hike, and China’s chokehold on rare earths threatened to derail trade talks between the two countries altogether. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a deal has now been “signed and sealed.” “They’re going to deliver rare earths to us,” Lutnick said, adding that the U.S. will then “take down our countermeasures.” Lutnick also indicated that Trump plans to announce further trade deals with other nations in the coming two weeks.
As climate talks in Bonn, Germany, wind down, negotiators there have agreed to increase the budget for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by 10% over the next two years to 81.5 million euros ($95.4 million). The UNFCCC runs some of the world’s largest climate negotiations and tries to ensure countries follow through on their climate commitments. Its budget is funded by government contributions. China will account for 20% of the new budget, Reuters reported. The U.S. is supposed to cover 22%, but President Trump has pulled international climate funding. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm has stepped in to cover the missing U.S. contributions. UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the budget increase was “a clear signal that governments continue to see UN-convened climate cooperation as essential, even in difficult times.”
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Hurricane forecasting is about to get a little bit more difficult. At the end of June, the federal government is going to stop distributing readings from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, a tool forecasters all over the world have been using to track and predict hurricane development. As retired federal meteorologist Alan Gerard told Bloomberg, this particular satellite program is unique because it lets forecasters peer inside storms and monitor for rapid intensification. As the planet warms, hurricanes are strengthening much faster than they did in recent decades. Hurricane expert Michael Lowry says the Department of Defense seems to be concerned that the satellite data poses a security concern. Its termination “will severely impede and degrade hurricane forecasts for this season and beyond, affecting tens of millions of Americans who live along its hurricane-prone shorelines,” Lowry wrote.
A group of U.S. car dealers penned a letter urging senators to “reject provisions in the budget reconciliation process that would abruptly eliminate EV-related tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act,” warning that sudden changes would bring about market uncertainty, damage businesses, and hurt Americans. The signatories – including EV Auto, Carmax, and Caravan – instead call for a “gradual sunset” of the EV tax credits to avoid disruption to the used car market. “A multi-year transitional period would also provide the opportunity for Americans to continue adopting cleaner vehicles more affordably,” they add. The tax and budget bill put forward by Senate Republicans would end the $7,500 EV tax credit within 180 days after the law’s passage.
A report out today from the International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that the world’s private jets produced more greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 than all the flights that took off from Heathrow Airport — the world’s fourth busiest airport — that same year. Emissions from private jets increased 25% over the past decade. A few more interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbits from the report:
International Council on Clean Transportation
Solar power accounted for more than 10% of U.S. electrical output in April, while wind provided about 14%. As Michelle Lewis at Electreknotes, “solar is now producing more electricity than hydropower, biomass, and geothermal combined.”
Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.
And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.
3. Bedford County, Pennsylvania – Arena Renewables is trying to thread a needle through development in one of the riskiest Pennsylvania counties for development, with an agriculture-fueled opposition risk score of 89.
4. Knox County, Ohio – The Ohio Power Siting Board has given the green light to Open Road Renewables’ much-watched Frasier Solar project.
5. Clay County, Missouri – We’ll find out next week if rural Missouri can still take it easy on a large solar project.
6. Clark County, Nevada – President Trump’s Bureau of Land Management has pushed back the permitting process for EDF Renewables’ Bonanza solar project by at least two months and possibly longer .
7. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington State has now formally overridden local opposition to Cypress Creek’s Carriger solar project after teeing up the decision in May.